You’ve probably heard Google is shutting down Google Reader on July 1st. What does this mean for bloggers? Should you be worried?

If you run a blog there are a lot of things to know about and consider doing with this change coming up that you’ll want to take care of in the next couple months.

In this post I’ll explain why Feedburner feed counts are going to take a huge hit, why you should transfer your RSS feed from Feedburner to another platform like FeedBlitz, and give you a few of the best alternatives to Google Reader if you are using it to read your RSS feeds. [Continue reading…]

Whether you measure it in total social media shares, unique visitors, or some other metric, let us know in the comments below this post what your most popular piece of content of all time is (written, video, or audio) and why you think it is.

The point of this isn’t to just pat ourselves on the back and talk about how great we are. The comments will end up being a place for you to look at what other people have created and see how you can do the same for your audience and platform.

In your comment, explain your thought process behind why you created the piece, how you went about titling it, and if you modeled it after someone else’s content (no shame in that) share who it was. [Continue reading…]

January 1st. The busiest day at the gym, the most Google searches for “diet”, and the beginning of all the other New Year’s resolutions people set for themselves. We all know most people fail at these goals, but everyone still makes them.

Why is that?

Because planning what you want to achieve is easier, sexier, and more fun than doing the work to actually get there.

So what happens? We fail a few weeks or months in.

Now don’t get me wrong, failing can be a good thing (even Seth Godin thinks so). But if you don’t learn anything valuable from your failures you will just have wasted your time, money, and energy.

And let’s face it, an “annual plan” is basically just business jargon for New Year’s resolution. [Continue reading…]